There are a good number of evangelicals in the United States and Canada who would not consider the New York Times to be a purveyor of Christian truth. The division turns out to be more political in nature than it is religious. I came across a guest editorial piece last week which basically argued that Christian faith has, at times, become dominated by slogans and catchphrases which belie a lack of depth and real consideration. It was a call to greater Christian depth and spirituality.
The editorial mentions that the very word “Jesus” can become more of a marketing gimmick than a call for spiritual consideration. I don’t know if you’ve seen the television show “The Righteous Gemstones”. It’s a production guided largely by Danny McBride (Eastbound and Down, Vice-Principals) which means that it is over the top ridiculous and super crude at very many points.
However, most of the things that it satirizes are things that people who have been familiar with mega-churches and evangelicalism have seen in real life.
The Gemstone family presides over a church which is called “The Gemstone Salvation Centre”. It’s the size of a NBA basketball arena. It’s all stage and lights and productions and slogans. The show doesn’t take real shots at real Christian faith, but it does shine a light on some of the things that are more marketing and slogan than faith. There is a group of almost comically muscle bound shirtless men called “The God Squad”. It all seems very unreal until you remember that in the the 1980’s and 1990’s there was a popular group of Christian evangelists called “The Power Team” which performed in churches, to youth groups and in a number of mega-churches. Power Team events would consist of amazing feats of strength followed by a talk in which “the gospel” would be presented.
Below are photos of the fictional “God Squad”, and an image of the very real “Next Generation” Power Team called “Power Force”.
Righteous Gemstones - “The God Squad”
Righteous Gemstones - “The God Squad”
The Next Generation Power Force (This is real.)
There are so many places to go with this kind of thing. We could consider the sometimes ridiculous lengths that churches can go in order to “evangelize”. My interest for this reflection is to think about how any time an attempt to market faith is taken up, the name of Jesus begins to become a slogan weaponized for sales and numbers.
The New York Times editorial is written by a Christian who had come upon a political slogan. The slogan, on the side of a candidate’s campaign bus, was simply, “Jesus, Guns and Babies”. The author of the piece comments about how the slogan was troubling to her, particularly troubling to her as a person of Christian faith. The name “Jesus” used now as “performative religiosity”, as a marker of a political tribe, as a “cudgel”. (Remember Matthew 15, “These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me”?)
I remember reading a number of years ago a book about a group of modern day monastics. The book was a look into the spirituality of the monastery. There was one part in the book in which one of the monastic leaders was asked what some of the marks of a deep Christian spirituality were. His response was to say that true spirituality was often demonstrated by a lack of “God-talk”. That is, he could tell people who had an actual abiding sense of God’s presence because they were the ones who were not talking about God so much. They didn’t have to market their faith. Perhaps this is a way of saying that there is not necessarily a correlation between the amount of times someone mentions God or Jesus and actual spiritual depth.
This might be a gift to some people to consider. In my work in the church and in hospital chaplaincy I often see a form of this phenomenon. In some families one person is the God-person or the Jesus-person. They have taken up the mantle of the religiously devoted one in the family and they talk about God A LOT. Sometimes other family members have a kind of fear of this person. There is an awareness that they will likely be judged by this person as spiritually or religiously inferior. This does not mean that the super religious person is not themselves kind or loving. Most times they are very much loved by the rest of the family. However, the other family members, even the ones who are Christians, often let this kind of person take centre stage in things to do with religion or faith. You don’t have to do this. I’m not saying that you should start a family fight, but as a pastor I have seen over and over again that the spirituality of the quieter people can be so overwhelmed by the loud God-talk of someone else. It’s hard to compete with the word “Jesus” painted on the side of a bus.